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Monthly Archives: October 2017

In the final days of October, the Service Prototyping Lab at Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) hosted two doctoral candidates who take part in the structured doctoral programme Information Technology and Systems at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane (UEM) in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. The candidates Martina Barros and Ambrósio Vumo arrived from Germany, as they spent a significant part of their research time at Technische Universität Dresden (TUD) as part of the DAAD-funded joint programme Welcome to Africa. The realisation of this programme also involves the Service Prototyping Lab as competence centre for research and innovation on cloud applications and new services for digital economies. This article describes how innovation transfer was conducted during the stay.

The past 27, 28 and 29 of September were dedicated to the 6th European Conference on Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing (ESOCC) in Oslo, Norway. It is one of the traditional community-run conferences in Europe with a cloud and community history dating back into the year 2012 and a (web) service history of about a decade before that. As in previous years, it featured the co-located event CloudWays: the 3rd International Workshop on Cloud Adoption and Migration, which is focused on cloud applications more than on infrastructure and platforms. The topic is thus of high interest for the Service Prototyping Lab and specially for its Cloud-Native Applications (CNA) research initiative in which we partner with Swiss SMEs to explore new cloud-native designs and architectures for elastically scalable, resilient, price-efficient and portable services. Our participation was therefore centered around the presentation of research results from one of these partnerships.

Among the lectures offered by the Service Prototyping Lab is Scripting. Aimed at students of advanced studies, it teaches essential practical programming skills and conveys approaches how to automate the exploration of data retrieved from the Internet. Python is taught as programming languages and consequently a Python (Django) web application has thus far been used to automatically score the results submitted by students of a particular advanced task towards the end of the lecture. There’s nothing wrong with Django per se, but its roots have evidently been in the era of monolithic web applications. Armored with our Function-as-a-Service experience we decided to drop it and go purely serverless. In production.

For third time in a row we attended ROSCon, this year held in beautiful Vancouver.
Our goals besides seeing the newest trends in the ROS and Robotics universe first hand, and finding some new robotic hardware directly from manufacturers, was to support our partners from Rapyuta Robotics (RR) in presenting and performing a demo of the first preview of their upcoming Cloud Robotics Platform.